Posted by Well, that's not exactly a lot to go on, so here's the best I can do. The Hooded Hood presents Twisted Organ, Dynamite Boy, and a mystery lady, in an adventure called: on April 06, 2001 at 16:52:18:
In Reply to: Write me, please! posted by Twisted Organ on April 06, 2001 at 14:40:28:
The Sinister Secret of the Heckfire Club
“Where am I?” Twisted Organ wondered, waking up with all the effects of a night before that involved pizza, curry, the return of pizza and curry, and alcohol at industrial levels, but having done none of that. “In fact, who am I?” Simonides Slaughter, Black Emperor of the Heckfire Club, called the meeting to order. “The Inner Circle is convened,” he proclaimed. “What do we have on the menu for today/” “I should explain that I have no memory of who I am or what I’m really like, so I’m making all this up as I go along,” Twisted Organ explained to the Heckfire Club. “I don’t know what sort of history I had before you erased it. All I know is that you are baddies, I don’t like you, and so I’m going to have to take you down.” “Of course I saved your life,” the Hooded Hood, cowled crime-czar and master of the ret-con, admitted as the battered hero questioned how he had been teleported to safety. “You saved me the trouble of doing something unpleasant to those Hero Feeders, so I felt I owed you a small recompense.”
“Wow. They really did a number on you, didn’t they?” Dynamite Boy asked sympathetically. He didn’t look much better himself, his body burned and bruised from his experiences.
“They did?” Twisted Organ asked. He forced himself to sit up and look at his surroundings. He was in a black marble cube lit by a dim globe high on the ceiling. A dozen figures crouched miserably in the shadows. “Who are they, then?”
“Prisoners, like us.”
“Not them they,” Twisted Organ clarified, “The them who did this number on me.”
“The Hero Feeders,” Dynamite Boy explained. “They’re sort of… parasites. They, well they eat heroes and legends. Absorb them somehow. Drain them. All those characters that were famous once and then everybody forgets them? Hero feeders got them. And they got us.”
“We were eaten?” Twisted Organ asked, checking his limbs. His dark blue costume was torn and tattered but as far as he could tell he had all the requisite pieces of person.
“Nah, not yet. I think they’re saving us for a special occasion. Every so often one of us gets dragged out of here and returned a bit more like a vegetable. Well, except for Marrow Boy, of course, who couldn’t really be more of a vegetable. But what I mean is that I think we’re being farmed.”
“I can’t remember anything except my name,” Twisted Organ worried. “And I’m not convinced that Twisted Organ is my real name.”
Dynamite Boy (who could remember that he was Jeremy Wick) backed away slightly. “Do you remember your superpowers?” he asked.
“No,” Twisted Organ frowned. “Unless it’s being spectacularly sick.” And he demonstrated.
“Oh wonderful,” a scornful voice from the other end of the black cube called. “Just what we need to make our confinement more pleasant.”
“It’s not his fault, Tessa,” Dynamite Boy objected. “He’s obviously had a pretty rough time of it when they caught him.”
The dark-haired young woman in the torn silk blouse was aristocratically beautiful and had the gift of looking down her nose with perfect disdain. “If he does it again I’m going to make him lick it up,” she warned.
“Sorry,” Twisted Organ said to them. “Isn’t there any way we could escape?”
“He could,” the woman calling herself Tessa snorted, gesturing at Jimmy Wick. “If he wasn’t a soft, weak, feckless do-gooder.”
“I have feck,” DB objected. “But I can’t kill everybody in here, including you Tessa, just to get free myself.”
“He has the power to explode,” Tessa explained to Twisted Organ. “Right up to the megaton range if he really tries and doesn’t want to re-form for a week. But to make a blast large enough to shatter this cage he couldn’t direct the force in just one vector. If I had his power then you’d all be smears across the rubble that was once this prison.”
“I’m sensing that you’re not one of the good gals,” Twisted Organ noted, “but you’re right that we have to try and escape somehow.”
“I’m open to suggestions,” Dynamite Boy admitted, “so long as it doesn’t involve killing everybody here.”
“How do your powers work exactly?” Twisted Organ asked him.
“I blow up. Then I un-blow up,” shrugged his fellow prisoner.
“How quickly do you re-form? Could you delay it?”
Tessa was very quick. “I see what you’re getting at,” she smiled coldly. “It might just work.”
“Always with your mind upon your stomach, Simon,” Anna Salem, the Club’s White Empress chided. “We do have business interests, political games, international incidents to consider on this little world you know. That is why we took these dreary three-dimensional shapes.”
She was correct, and the seven creatures in human shape assembled in the plush Pierce Heights mansion overlooking Paradopolis knew it. As the Resolution War grew ever closer the forces which vied with each other to control, create, or destroy the heroes of the Parodyverse kept closer and closer watch upon their charges. Hero Feeders were not appreciated. Slaughter’s cabal had been forced to go to quite a lot of trouble to manipulate events so they could cull off a few straggling superhumans.
“Oh, very well,” the Emperor sighed. “What do we have that can replace those hero concentration camps that Messenger closed down?"
“Things were going rather well with an attempt to penetrate the Safe,” Frederick Scarfe reported, “That super-penitentiary would have been rich feeding grounds for us, until all the schedule-A villains vanished out of their cells in a single night and nobody noticed for weeks.”
“We’re not ready to take on the Hooded Hood yet,” Slaughter snarled, in a ‘but-one-day’ tone. “What else have we got?”
“We are considering reopening a School for Gifted Children,” Anna reported. “We might have to take steps to keep the Order of the Observing Eye at bay, since they might object to us using the idea they had to prepare the next generation of heroes to prepare the next generation of dinners.”
“School meals never taste that good,” quipped Scarfe.
“And the Word beat us to the reformed-villains-in-a-team idea,” the White Empress noted. “Although I have hopes that we can bag the whole lot of them when that CrazySugarFreakHero! works out that his mentor is also his greatest enemy.”
“That’s all very well for the future,” Simonides Slaughter scowled, “but for now we will have to stick with our plan of manufacturing super-types for our own consumption. I know that battery-bred heroes don’t have the same flavour, but when we let them run wild a bit first as we did with Dynamite Boy…”
“Can you believe that the idiot still thinks his origin was accidental?” chuckled Professor Hammond Sterr. “As if a quantum chemist of my stature would make errors and accidentally empower a complete loser like that.”
“Enough talk,” the Black Emperor decided. “I wish to feast. Bring us a victim, flunkies.”
“Who shall it be today then?” Anna wondered. “The girl? She has plenty of spirit left.”
“Dynamite Boy,” suggested the Professor. “His stupidity has a special flavour.”
“Bring Twisted Organ,” ordered Slaughter. “Given his true identity he should be a unique feast.”
“How entertaining,” the White Empress smiled. “I do so love playing with my food.”
“How exactly do you propose to take us down, little hero?” Simonides Slaughter smirked. “You stand here, bound and helpless, at the heart of our power. Nobody remembers you. Nobody will mourn you. Nobody will even care when you have gone.”
“I intend to take you down with the help of my allies,” Twisted Organ explained. “When we heard your flunkies coming to take one of us Dynamite Boy detonated himself. It was just a small explosion, enough to knock me down but not to harm me much. Then he used all his willpower to prevent himself reforming until I was dragged out of prison. Effectively, I carried him to freedom. By now he will have rescued the other prisoners and denied you of your sustenance.”
The Inner Circle exchanged nervous glances. “Go check,” the Black Emperor told Professor Sterr.
“Oh, it’s true,” Tessa admitted, striding into the plush feasting room. “At least as far as our hero here knows it. That was the plan, and it would have worked wonderfully if it hadn’t been for me knocking Dynamite Boy unconscious after he set me free.”
“What?” Twisted Organ gasped. “But he rescued you!”
“I shall be eternally grateful,” Tessa promised insincerely. “However, it occurred to me that what we have here is a little leverage for some constructive bargaining. I surmise that we are in the Heckfire Club, one of the richest and most powerful institutions on the planet. And I notice that you are lacking a candidate for the role of Black Empress.”
“You are not a Hero Feeder, human!” snarled Anna Salem.
“Where does it say in the constitution that I have to be?” shrugged Tessa. “The fact is that I need a power-base for my… ambitions. You need someone to run the business end of your takeaway store. And most of all you need someone to deactivate the auto-explode timer I’ve placed on Dynamite Boy that will make him terminally explode in what I estimate to be a hundred megaton explosion in about four minutes.”
“But, that will destroy all of Paradopolis and Gothametropolis!” warned Twisted Organ.
“That is only a fortunate side effect,” Tessa smiled.
“But… why, Tessa? Why do all this?” Twisted Organ objected. “You could all have just got away while I held them off.”
“Getting away is for weaklings and cowards,” the woman answered. “And ‘Tessa’ is only a convenient nom de voyage. It is short for Contessa. Contessa Ilsa Imke Zemo, thirteenth countess of Saxe-Lurkburg. If I had friends they might call me Zemette. It is my destiny to rule this planet with a grip of iron.”
“Zemette,” Slaughter admired. “There may be a place for you with us yet. If we can only…”
“No!” Twisted Organ objected. “I will not allow this evil to continue. I shall stop you. I shall!”
A pain welled up in the amnesiac hero’s torn and broken body, but he ignored it. He found himself spinning, faster and faster. The room didn’t blur however. Rather it was as if his senses speeded up with his whirling so that he could see every effect the hurricane he was gathering around him was having.
First napkins and curtains whipped around the room. Then larger objects toppled and broke. Slaughter rose from his chair but was blown from his feet. Tessa tried to shout something but it was lost in the gathering gale. And still Twisted Organ continued on, faster and faster, pushing the pain out of his mind and concentrating on the vortex around him.
The Hero Feeders tried to lock their power on to him, to diminish him again, to take what was left of him. He shrugged them off in the majesty of his power. At a thought the walls of the feasting chamber bowed outwards. The whole mansion shook. The Inner Circle, their flunkies, Zemette herself were flung around like rags before the tornado.
Across Paradopolis cars stopped and passers-by stared as the unfamiliar wind funnel rose from Pierce Heights and towered over the city.
The Heckfire Club split apart from within as Twisted Organ broke free and rose into the air.
Now he could sense all that was happening within the coil of air he controlled. Lying there in the rubble was the stunned Dynamite Boy. If the winds which dragged the detonator off him and hurled him to freedom were somewhat rough they at least saved his life.
Simonides Slaughter screamed something, perhaps some kind of threat or warning, into the wind. Then he and his fellow Hero Feeders abandoned their precious human bodies and slid back into the Nexus beyond realities, where old stories go to die. They took the Contessa with them.
Suddenly the pain was too much for Twisted Organ. He spasmed once and became still. He fell from the skies like a broken puppet.
And vanished.
“You’re a villain too, though,” Twisted Organ argued. “I should be battling you now, not having dinner with you.”
“Let’s just say that we have different perspectives about who should be running the multiverse, shall we?” the Hood suggested. “You have to know when to pick your fights.”
“I’ve never met an archvillain before,” Dynamite Boy admitted. “So far the best I’ve had is Professor Sterr.”
“It is always useful to know your enemies,” the cowled crime czar noted. He turned his glowing green eyes on Twisted Organ. “And to know yourself.”
“I have a life somewhere,” the amnesiac hero told him. “I must have gained these tornado powers somehow. I must have a real name. I’m going to find them.”
“That will be fascinating to observe,” the Hood replied. “Well, I shall return you both to Paradopolis now. When next we meet, it shall, of course, be as enemies.”
“Oh cra…” Dynamite Boy said as they vanished.
The Hooded Hood allowed himself a small, sinister chuckle. “Neither of them ever even wondered how they came to the attention of the Hero Feeders in the first place. Neither of them questioned how Zemette came to be there. It must be pleasant to be a simple little hero. So few things to worry about.”
Then he went back to his plotting.
The horrendously out-of-date Who’s Who of the Parodyverse (version 7.0)
The Hooded Hood’s Homepage of Doom, for all your old Parodyverse story needs
I hope this suffices, TO. Welcome to the Parodyverse.
HH